COMMEMORATIVE MAGAZINEJULY 2017•Hitchcock – 1973•Galveston - Stewart Road – 1975•Santa Fe – 1977•Texas City – 1982•Crystal Beach – 1985•Galveston - Broadway – 1991•La Marque – FM 1764 – 1993•Kemah – 1995•Galveston - Pirates Beach – 1995•Dickinson – 1996•League City – 1998•Friendswood – 1999•La Marque - Oak St – 1999•Winnie – 2006•Baytown – 2006•Fannett – 2006•Pearland – 2007•Mid County – 2012•Pasadena – 2012•Houston – 2012•Hull – 2014•Liberty – 2014From 1973... ... to now.We’re PROUD to call Galveston County home. 22 locations strong:www.texasfirst.bankHAPPY 175 ANNIVERSARY,DAILY NEWS! Seated: Earl Jenkins, Marvin Briggs, Lawrence Henckel, Bob Bertolett, Thelma Franks, F.H. Huntington, John Buvens Standing: Dr. W.J. Estrada, Irvin Reeves, Rod Rehm, Dr. John Thiel, Emmett F. Lowry, Charles T. Doyle, Jack Fassetta, Lawrence Del Papa, Dr. Roger Youmans, Authur Autry, Dominic TibaldoLeft to Right: Charles T. Doyle, Matthew Doyle, Catherine Potter, Carlos Garza, Christopher Doyle, Mitchell Chuoke, David Daspit, Lee Ardell, Timothy O’Brien, Dennis Bettison, Pat Plaia, Gaddis Wittjen, Carlos Peña, Commissioner Stephen Holmes, Dickey Campbell Not pictured: Travis Hardwick, David DoyleTexas First Bank is proud to have partnered with you for 44 years and counting! Truly community banking at its best.TH 2 | The Daily News | Celebrating 175 Years 175 YEARS 175 YEARS OF PROGRESS ACROSS THE ISLANDTHANKING THE DAILY NEWSWATCH THE2017 STATEOF THE CITYHERE'S TO THE NEXTFOLLOW THEPROGRESS Celebrating 175 Years | The Daily News | 34 | The Daily News | Celebrating 175 Years ON THE COVERTABLE OF CONTENTS18192122242628303236384044746450666755678Publisher’s NoteEditor’s NoteChronicling the history of The Daily NewsThe Founders: Samuel BangsThe Founders: Willard RichardsonThe Founders: Alfred BeloFive Questions for Lissa WallsA Note from Dolph TillotsonA Note from Jim YarbroughMajor Stories: SecessionMajor Stories: Galveston Harbor DeepeningMajor Stories: The Great FireMajor Stories: The 1900 StormMajor Stories: The Texas City DisasterMajor Stories: Hurricane IkeNews’ buildings are parts of the local landscapeAdvertising IndexThe Philosophy of Carmage WallsThe Daily News upholds a 175-year-long philosophyHow news will be generated and distributed in 2117The definition of news has evolved, as has its presentationTechnology at The Daily News: A history of advancementMichael Bluitt checks a page and adjusts the press during a run of The Daily News. JENNIFER REYNOLDS (FRONT COVER) A teletype operator works in the old Galveston News building downtown. DAILY NEWS FILE(BACK COVER) Skip McComb threads newsprint into the web press at The Daily News. JENNIFER REYNOLDSCOVERS & DESIGN BY KAITLIN SCHMIDT175 YEARSThe Daily News is older than the telephone, household electricity and even the state of Texas. That is what we call economic staying power. The Galveston Economic Development Partnership (GEDP) would like to congratulate The Daily News for the remarkable achievements of successfully serving the community for 175 years. While the GEDP mission is to help attract and create the environment for economic development in the region, The Daily News is a great example of how important a strong, long-term business can positively impact a community. Here is to another 175!Mark your calendars for the GEDP Economic Summit Thursday, October 18, 2017 | Call 409.770.0216 for informationis kind of a big deal Celebrating 175 Years | The Daily News | 5One hundred and seventy-five years feels almost like an abstract number.As I sit here, publisher of the oldest newspaper in Texas, I am sincerely humbled.One realization you gain in leading a newspaper is that you are simply a steward of the time you occupy the role. Time and people march onward. Your time, however, is limited. In this case, regardless of the calendar, I will be but a blip on the history of The Daily News.I’ve followed some big shoes, most recently Dolph Tillotson. The man still knows more in his pinkie finger than I will ever hope to learn. And if you ask him, he too will tip his hat to the talented leaders who came before him. We are passing a baton of sorts — one with responsibilities none of us ever dreamed of holding for a community. This is humbling, to say the least.The Daily News is a storied newspaper around the state of Texas. Under the leadership of a long string of innovative leaders, the newspaper has continuously cut a powerful pathway for others to follow.From having its own private rail car to deliver newspapers around the state to putting up the first telephone in Texas, The Daily News has always been an innovator. Even when it came to the digital age, The Daily News was on the internet before most people could even spell the word.Today we continue to reinvent ourselves — most recently successfully moving into the magazine business with Coast Monthly. And the good news is we have other new items in the pipeline. Some will succeed, others may not. But we will never stop working to provide valuable services to the community.This magazine is about a collective living history — one we plan on telling with the passing of each significant milestone.LEONARD WOOLSEY6 | The Daily News | Celebrating 175 Years 175 YEARS OF INNOVATION CONTINUES BY LEONARD WOOLSEYMike Dean, left, who owns numerous island businesses, is congratulated by Leonard Woolsey, president and publisher of The Daily News, after being named the paper’s 2017 Citizen of the Year for his charitable work through Yaga’s Children’s Fund. JENNIFER REYNOLDSIf you’re reading this commemoration of The Daily News’ 175 years on or near July 16, 2017, you’re likely a subscriber.For that, you have my personal thanks, along with that of the staff, which works every day to produce a newspaper worthy of your continued support.A lot goes into producing a quality newspaper, time and money, for example. And success depends on numerous variables, some beyond any editor’s control. But none of those is more important to the journalists working here than the readers. That’s who we serve and few days pass that we don’t discuss how to do it better.We launched this project with a lot of excitement, but also some trepidation. Newspaper journalists have a peculiar relationship with the practice of recounting history. We provide the raw material from which historical writing is constructed, but we’re not necessarily all that adept at it. We’re a forward-looking bunch, by inclination and necessity. This particular topic was doubly thorny because we’d be writing about ourselves. Can you do that with the arm’s length detachment required for credible journalism?We attempted to solve these problems by retaining a skilled freelancer with an affinity for digging deep into the historical record and breathing readability into old facts. After editing the thousands of words contained between these covers, I believe we’ve done what newspaper people set out to achieve each day — we produced a good read.I’ve been a Daily News fan since I first read it in the strip-mall offices of a lesser newspaper more than 20 years ago. I’ve dug some into its storied past. Even so, I learned something on just about every page of this magazine and thoroughly enjoyed a journey through the history of a newspaper that just wouldn’t quit. I hope you do, too.MICHAEL A. SMITHEmployees of The Galveston County Daily News and Galveston Newspapers Inc. celebrate the newspaper’s 175th anniversary. JENNIFER REYNOLDSBY MICHAEL A. SMITH Celebrating 175 Years | The Daily News | 7TAKE A TRIP THROUGH THE DAILY NEWS’ STORIED PASTBY TOM BASSING8 | The Daily News | Celebrating 175 Years It has been 175 years since a newspaper known as The Daily News first appeared in Galveston, a city far different from the one in which we live today.So, too, has the newspaper changed during those years: from the way it’s printed and where it’s printed to the frequency with which it has been printed and even the name under which it has been printed. Its front page over the years has carried the banner of The Daily News, The News, The Galveston News, The Galveston Daily News and, today, The Galveston County Daily News, the last of which best reflects its emphasis and reach, extending from Galveston Island north to Clear Creek, from Galveston Bay west to the Brazoria County line, and east along the Bolivar Peninsula.One thing, however, hasn’t changed at all: The paper has steadfastly adhered to pioneering editor and publisher Willard Richardson’s philosophy that The Daily News present an independent voice, beholden to no one, and that its content be something its readers can rely on to be thorough and fair.Here unfolds a chronicle of its history — that of the oldest newspaper in the broad, vast state of Texas — from its humble debut, on April 11, 1842, to its multimedia present, 17 and a half decades later.I. BIRTH OF A PAPEROn a blustery and unseasonably cold Monday morning in early April 1842, Galveston’s latest newspaper — 300 or so single sheets of paper, each printed on both sides and folded over, four pages in all — appeared on the counters of downtown Galveston’s merchants.The paper’s masthead identified it as The Daily News and a box just below it boasted that it was “Published Every Day (Sundays Excepted) By George H. French.” Yet, save for the first few weeks, it neither appeared daily nor was it particularly newsy.Nor, history suggested, was The Daily News likely long for this world; indeed, two months later a competitor reported its apparent demise, the actual fate of more than a dozen fleeting startups during the nine years that Texas was a republic.Hamilton Stuart’s Civilian and Galveston City Gazette, by then a robust 4 years old, reported with restrained glee that The Daily News had joined, among others, the Commercial Intelligencer, the Daily Galvestonian, the Morning Herald, the People’s Advocate, the Commercial Chronicle and the unfortunately but presciently named Croaker in passing into history.The Daily News’ tombstone, had Stuart’s account proved correct, would have read, simply, “Born April 11, 1842; Died June 11, 1842.” And that grave marker would have stood with all the others in a cemetery hastily filling up because of an epidemic of egotism in competition for a tiny audience; Galveston in 1842 was, after all, home to a mere 1,000 souls, some of whom were slaves.A secondary cause of death would have been listed as the absence of any genuine effort to get out and gather news. It was enough, those ill-fated publishers reckoned, to arrange for the use of a press for the self-aggrandizing purpose of pontificating on the issues of the day.What news they ran was stale at best, mostly relying on occasional reports brought by travelers from the mainland or cribbed from papers arriving aboard ships from New Orleans.In that regard, The Daily News in its earliest iteration probably deserved the fate of its deceased brethren.The oldest extant copy of The Daily News, that of Tuesday, April 19, 1842, carried on its front page, aside from mention of the recent spate of foul weather from the north, some advertising — including a notice that the paper’s founder, an itinerant printer, filibuster and former prisoner of war named Samuel Bangs, was available for any and all printing needs and another that he was willing to part with two leagues of Texas land the Mexican state of Tamaulipas had granted him under his legal Mexican name, Jose Manuel Bancs, for services rendered to Mexico during its first years of independence from Spain — and the text of a tariff act passed by the congress of the Republic of Texas three months before.‘AN HONEST, AN UPRIGHT, A TRUTHFUL JOURNAL’Chronicling The Daily News’ history Celebrating 175 Years | The Daily News | 9(ABOVE) The Galveston News was the first to occupy a building created specifically to house a newspaper publishing plant. The building, in the 2100 block of Mechanic Street, was designed by Nicholas J. Clayton. DAILY NEWS FILE (LEFT) The old Galveston News building is on Mechanic Street in downtown Galveston. STUART VILLANUEVAWhat stood as up-to-date news were announcements of arriving ships — the schooners Falcon and Neptune, notably, the latter bringing 27 passengers and 15 slaves, and the sloop Phoenix — and mention of a concert scheduled that week at the old Tremont House.It was in such fashion that The Daily News slogged on for the next two months, publishing sporadically, reliant on the similarly sporadic arrival of ships from New Orleans, until Stuart’s Civilian on June 12, 1842, attempted to lay it to rest.II. A LULL AND A REBIRTHA year later, Stuart reported on what appeared to be nothing more than yet another paper’s birth, a terse announcement that “Messrs. M. Cronican and Co. have commenced in this city, the publication of a small semiweekly paper entitled ‘The News.’ ”The new paper, was, in fact, The Daily News’ return to life, nearly as unlikely as had been that of Lazarus. It would be Stuart’s Civilian itself turning up dead some 40 years later, its proprietor kindly hired by The News to write editorials.Messrs. M. Cronican and Co. were the printer Michael Cronican and the apprentice printer Wilbur Cherry, originally from Boston and Oswego, N.Y., respectively, who had come to Texas not to get into newspapering but to join the future republic’s fight for independence from Mexico.Cronican, then 26 and a member of the renowned New Orleans Grays, a volunteer militia mustered at first word of the Texas revolution, had arrived in 1835, as had Cherry, who at 15 had run away from home to join the fray. They met that year during the Texans’ October to December siege of San Antonio de Béxar.Texas gained its independence the following April — just 15 years after Mexico had won its own freedom — and Cronican and Cherry resumed their previous careers, opening a small print shop in Galveston.Next >